Coming to terms with the past in postwar literature and philosophy

Central pre-occupations for the authors and philosophers of the postwar period werehow Germany could fall to the depths of Nazism and what was necessary to remove its renegade status and

C H A P T E R S I X

Coming to terms with the past in postwar literature

and philosophyRobert C Holub

T H E T R O U B L E D L E G A C Y

From until at least reunification in  German intellectual andcultural life, including philosophy and literature, was dominated by theendeavour to come to terms with the past At the conclusion of its sec-ond military defeat in less than three decades, Germany was morallyexhausted and physically devastated In contrast to the First World War,when Germany surrendered before it was invaded by foreign armies,the Second World War brought tremendous losses for Germans both onthe battlefield and at home Three and a half million German soldierslost their lives fighting for Adolf Hitler and his Reich, and just as manycivilians perished; ten million German soldiers were taken as prisoners

of war, some never to return The economic destruction was immense:Germany, reduced in size by about a quarter, experienced a loss of about

a third of its national wealth, along with fifteen percent of its availablehousing Hardest hit were the major cities, which were the primary tar-gets in the Allied air attacks Shortly after the end of hostilities anotherpressing problem arose: the refugees from the East began pouring into

a country that could not even take care of its own population It is mated that up to twenty-five million Germans lost their homes because

esti-of evacuation, flight or bombing The situation was most dire in the ern portions of Germany, where the battles between the German andthe invading Soviet armies had been severely contested

east-The defeat of Germany was total and devastating, but the intellectualpreoccupation with the past resulted not so much from Germany’s dis-credited military tradition or its desperate economic situation Indeed,

as the postwar years have demonstrated, Germany was able to overcomeits authoritarian tendencies, developing into an exemplary democraticnation, and a scant decade and a half after its unconditional surrender

it had become one of the leading economic powers in the world But



 Robert C Holub

it was not able to overcome two legacies that have haunted its culturallife for the last half century The first of these legacies is Nazism, whichhas come to be synonymous with absolute evil National Socialism andAdolf Hitler hold a special place in German as well as world history;they transcend the militarism and authoritarianism that nurtured theiremergence and have long since been regarded as a permanent blemish

on the German character After the war German intellectual and literaryhistorians had to account for how their nation, apparently so culturedand advanced, could fall prey to the brutality and barbarity of the Third

Reich Georg Luk´acs’s Zerst¨orung der Vernunft ( ; Destruction of reason),

which traced the rise of Nazism back through the German cal tradition, was perhaps rightly criticised for its distortions of seminaltexts, but several works produced in the West, for example Friedrich

philosophi-Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe (; The German catastrophe) or Alfred Martin’s Geistige Wegbereiter des deutschen Zusammenbruchs (; Intellectual

precursors of the German collapse), or even Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus

(; Doctor Faustus), with slightly different emphases, likewise foundHitler’s rise prepared by the German intellectual tradition Central pre-occupations for the authors and philosophers of the postwar period werehow Germany could fall to the depths of Nazism and what was necessary

to remove its renegade status and to preserve respectability among thenations of the world

The second and more important legacy with which Germany has had

to contend in the postwar period was the Holocaust or Shoah AlthoughGermany perpetrated many criminal actions against its own citizensduring the period– and against other peoples during the SecondWorld War, and although under National Socialist rule many religious,ethnic and political groups – the Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, ho-mosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Eastern Europeans, communists andsocialists – were severely persecuted, the German genocide of the Jewishpeople occupies a special place in history The enormity of the under-taking – over five million Jews were murdered – the systematic nature ofthe annihilation and the recognition that these acts of mass murder wereplanned and carried out by a nation formerly considered among the mostcivilised on earth are factors that make the Holocaust remarkable andalmost unfathomable Postwar writers and philosophers were faced withthe impossible task of explaining how a nation could allow such acts to becommitted in its name and how to deal with the pressing issues of guilt,responsibility and expiation But they were also confronted with a series

of practical and theoretical issues arising from the Holocaust A central

Postwar literature and philosophy concern of several intellectuals immediately after the war and for theensuing decades was how to ensure that the Holocaust would not recuragain in Germany Philosophers, writers and critics asked themselveswhat kinds of cultural, political and institutional reforms were needed toeliminate anti-democratic attitudes, to ensure an informed, critical andautonomous voting public and to prevent xenophobic and racist senti-ments With regard to more theoretical matters intellectuals found thatthe assumptions they made prior to the Holocaust were no longer valid.Progress and enlightenment had to be considered dubious notions; theconnection between morality and civilisation seemed tenuous; indeed,all explanations of human history, all precepts of modernity appeared

to be called into question by the horrific crimes of National Socialismagainst the Jewish people of Europe

The demise of National Socialism and its attendant barbarity wasnecessarily accompanied by a new consciousness and a new missionfor German intellectuals Because the four years of Allied occupation

in – and the establishment of self-sufficient German states peared to represent a radical break with the Third Reich, critics have

ap-often hypothesised a zero-point (Nullpunkt) or ‘clear-felling’ (Kahlschlag) of

German culture in the postwar era Further evidence for such a newbeginning comes from the discontinuity of intellectual life from NationalSocialist Germany to the Federal Republic and the German Demo-cratic Republic Although older writers and philosophers emerged fromso-called inner emigration and, particularly in the GDR, several promi-nent authors returned from exile, literary and intellectual life, especially

in the West, found new and important contributors The establishment

of Gruppe  (Group ), a loosely structured West German writers’

organisation that served as a showcase for young authors, set an logical agenda that was clearly anti-fascist and individualistic, in short,

ideo-a rupture with the culturideo-al politics of the preceding yeideo-ars Similideo-arly inEast Germany the tone was resolutely against Nazism, and although acollectivist spirit soon engulfed all purely intellectual activity, there was

an unmistakable endeavour to distance culture from its past trappings

New journals were another sign of a fresh start – Der Ruf (The call ), Die

Sammlung (The gathering), or Die Wandlung (The transformation) in the Western

zones, Ost und West (East and west) or Sinn und Form (Meaning and form) in

the East – and before the cold war divided Germany into camps ally at war with one another, a similar spirit of renewal pervaded bothEast and West Especially important were foreign influences In a certainsense West Germany caught up with the rest of the Western world in the

cultur- Robert C Holub

initial postwar period, and the reintroduction of abstract art, atonal sic and an existentially informed literature and philosophy were signs ofits reintegration into the family of civilised nations

mu-Despite efforts to forge a new cultural climate, relying on foreign ratherthan corrupted German traditions, intellectual life was not entirely freefrom continuities either With the advent of the cold war, the communistenemy seemed more important than the National Socialist past, and as aresult many former Nazis or fellow travellers were able to regain power

in the cultural sphere Especially in the Federal Republic, universitylife continued to be dominated by professors active under Hitler, andmany governmental and bureaucratic offices, including much of thejuridical system, soon saw former National Socialists again in leadingpositions More importantly, however, the new generation of democraticwriters acknowledged their own affiliation with the traditions of a ‘better’Germany Often they reached back to the artistic and intellectual heritage

of the Weimar Republic, or to other democratic figures or periods inGerman history for their inspiration After the trauma of the war and theHolocaust it was necessary to recreate German philosophical and literaryhistory in a reflective fashion to enable a new orientation But manyintellectuals soon recognised that it was not really possible to separate out

a ‘good’ German tradition from its ‘evil’ perversion; a complex dialecticinforms aesthetic and philosophical development Indeed, the tension inpostwar German philosophy and literature from the end of the war rightthrough unification comes from the collective effort to escape the longshadow of the past, on the one hand, and, on the other, the constant need

to recall, represent, reinterpret, repudiate Germany’s troubled legacy

flections from the forties, Dialektik der Aufkl¨arung (Dialectic of Enlightenment)

by Theodor Adorno (–) and Max Horkheimer (–) ployed a sociological analysis informed broadly by psychoanalysis andthe tradition of Western Marxism. Composed during the last year ofthe war and published in a limited edition in Amsterdam in, thisbook eventually became one of the most influential works of the postwar

em-Postwar literature and philosophy years, although its enormous impact came only during the s withthe appearance of the student movement The authors, two Jewish intel-lectuals who returned to Germany after the war and occupied universityposts, are among the most celebrated members of the Frankfurt School

of Social Research, a group devoted to interdisciplinary study that arose

in the lates in Frankfurt and, because of its leftist and Jewish file, was forced to leave Germany after Hitler’s assumption of power.The book was therefore written while Adorno and Horkheimer were inexile in the United States; the preface, completed in May, bears the

pro-place designation Los Angeles, California The framework for Dialektik

der Aufkl¨arung is much larger than Hitler or the Holocaust: the authors’

purview encompasses the course of the Western world since the Greeks.The central thesis, succinctly stated, is that Enlightenment turns back

on itself Conceiving Enlightenment in its widest sense as a pattern ofhuman domination over nature or as instrumental rationality, Adornoand Horkheimer demonstrate how this domination, which was origi-nally emancipatory, eventually turns into hegemony in various spheres

of human existence They argue that the endeavour to control the forces

of nature forms a seamless continuity with the suppression of humannature and oppression of human beings; thus what we originally con-ceive as emancipation becomes enslavement to others or to ourselves

The initial chapter in Dialektik der Aufkl¨arung deals with the ‘concept of

Enlightenment’ in fairly abstract terms; the two famous excursuses to thischapter take up Odysseus as the prototypical Enlightenment figure andJuliette, the character created by the Marquis de Sade, to show how en-lightened morality turns into something rather less than ethical conduct

In a chapter relating directly to the experiences of the Frankfurt School

in the United States, Horkheimer and Adorno then turn to the cultureindustry Here they are intent on showing how popular culture in theWestern world performs a function analogous to political oppression onother parts of the globe Their vision is thus one of a totally adminis-tered world In Germany and much of Europe fascism reigns; in theSoviet Union the population is subjugated by an oppressive state social-ism; in the United States the culture industry gives us only the illusion

of freedom

Perhaps the most relevant section of Dialektik der Aufkl¨arung for

un-derstanding the Third Reich is the chapter entitled ‘Elements of Semitism’ Like the book as a whole, this chapter treats contemporaryevents as part of a larger philosophical reflection We are not given

anti-a history of anti-anti-Semitism, or anti-an anti-ananti-alysis of anti-anti-Jewish tranti-aditions in

 Robert C Holub

Germany, but rather the general mechanisms that account for Semitism and by which anti-Semitism functions Initially Adorno andHorkheimer reject the view that anti-Semitism is a distortion of the so-cial order; for a society based on fascist principles it is a prerequisite andnecessity The liberal account, which considers Jews individuals and notdifferent from other peoples, does not recognise the exigencies of power,and in this sense the fascist perspective on the Jews is just as true asthe liberal interpretation What allows anti-Semitism to insinuate itself

anti-in the twentieth century is the total domanti-ination to which we as citizens

of modernity are subjected In essence, people living under a system ofdomination are deprived of choice, autonomy and subjectivity Unfortu-nately these same people are then set loose as ‘individuals’ (which they arenot) to act or at least to perform actions in a social order What resultsare ‘senseless reflexes’ in the behaviourist mode, ritualised behaviour,non-thinking, non-reflective responses to situations and the reduction ofgroups to stereotypes Adorno and Horkheimer associate anti-Semitismwith totality, a total response that does not admit of critique, reflection,

or differentiation In this totalised situation people can readily believethat Jews are parasitic elements of a fundamentally sound economicorder, and they can be held responsible for the exploitation of the domi-nant system of production Distortions and abnormalities of all types areultimately projected onto the Jews, who function as the repository forthe psychotic nature of modernity For Adorno and Horkheimer, anti-Semitism is not an essence of the fascist system, but one interchangeableplank in a party platform, something that may desist, only to be replaced

by another pernicious prejudice Only with the cessation of domination

as our mode of relating to the world and each other can we rid ourselves

of the root cause of anti-Semitism

As Jews living in exile, Adorno and Horkheimer observed events inGermany and Europe from the outside They did not and could notspeak directly to the most pressing issues confronting most Germans,who suddenly found themselves indicted in the eyes of the world be-cause of their implicit complicity with the Hitler regime Among thefew intellectuals who addressed these concerns in the immediate post-war period was Karl Jaspers (–), whose essay on Die Schuldfrage(; The question of German guilt), more than any other text in the post-war epoch, established the official agenda for Germany with regard toNazism and its crimes.Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Jaspers had hisphilosophical training and initial reputation from activities prior to.Originally a student and then a professor of psychology and psychiatry,

Postwar literature and philosophy Jaspers became during the Weimar Republic a noted professor of phi-losophy and, along with his colleague Martin Heidegger (–),one of the founders of existentialism Although he remained politicallynaive throughout thes, once the Nazis came to power he refusedcooperation, and in he lost his teaching position, in part because ofhis marriage to a Jewess After the war his central concern was to restorethe integrity of the German system of higher education, and most of hiswritings in the pivotal years– focus on issues at German universi-

ties Indeed, the preface to Die Schuldfrage makes it clear that this essay as

well was conceived as part of his personal pedagogical programme: after

a period in which higher education had been instrumentalised for suchnefarious objectives, he was proposing an attitude and a method for theentire nation that could move it towards a spiritual renewal

Jaspers’s essay is a response to several postwar exigencies In ing ways to approach the topic of guilt, Jaspers is competing with twocontemporary occurrences: denazification and the Nuremberg Trials.Denazification was the Allied method for dealing with the enormousnumber of Germans implicated by membership in the Nazi party orrelated organisations, or by non-military activities during the war; itsgoal was to cleanse dangerous elements from positions of responsibility.Administered first by the occupying powers and later by the Germansthemselves, denazification was by all accounts a failure The question-naires Germans were asked to complete became objects of ridicule –

suggest-as evidenced in the satirical novel by Ernst von Salomon (–),

Der Fragebogen ( ; The questionnaire) – and eventually the vast

majo-rity of Germans received pardons or outright acquittal for all crimes.The initial Nuremberg Trials, which were taking place while Jaspers was

writing Die Schuldfrage, were meant to adjudicate the guilt of the more

prominent Nazi officials and the leaders of industry who were cated in high crimes Somewhat more successful than denazification intheir rigour, the Nuremberg Trials also served an exemplary functionand demonstrated to the native populace and to the world that the rule

impli-of law had returned to German soil Indeed, Jaspers’s text, which wascompleted before the end of the first of the eleven Nuremberg Trials,

is a German defence of the legitimacy of the trials, a legitimacy thatmany other Germans called into question on a number of technical andsubstantive grounds In arguing that Nuremberg is not simply victor’sjustice, and that the actions of certain officials, although not violations ofstatutes existing at the time, were still offences that could be legitimatelytried, Jaspers sanctioned the Allied undertaking

 Robert C Holub

But Jaspers also challenged an opinion prevalent in certain circles inthe Allied powers that would hold all Germans equally accountable forthe crimes perpetrated by National Socialism One of the main func-

tions of Die Schuldfrage is to refute the collective guilt hypothesis In doing

so, Jaspers was opposing factions that would have favoured the plete de-industrialisation of Germany, and relying on more moderateopinions, in particular those of Hannah Arendt (–) and DwightMacDonald (–) Arendt, whose thesis on totalitarianism was tobecame a cornerstone of Western ideology in thes, and whose re-port on the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in  achieved notorietyfor its ‘banality-of-evil’ thesis, contended in  that guilt cannot befairly determined by an outside agency MacDonald, even more radi-cally, maintained that the most heinous crimes were carried out againstthe will and without the knowledge of the German people Jaspers, aspart of the vanquished, could not be quite so defensive about his country

com-or compatriots, but he did suggest categcom-ories that mitigated the guilt andthe responsibility of most Germans for the crimes committed in theirnames Only criminal guilt, he asserted, could be tried before a court

of law and punished All other forms of guilt had different adjudicativeauthorities and consequences Political guilt belonged in the hands of thevictors; the appropriate punishment was a loss of sovereignty; the ThirdReich can thus be found guilty in a political sense because of the actions

of the state, but this guilt holds no direct consequences for individuals.For individuals not guilty in the criminal sense Jaspers develops the cate-gories of moral and metaphysical guilt One’s conscience and one’s God,respectively, are the authorities that determine these classes of guilt, andthe consequences are such vaguely religious notions as penance and thetransformation of oneself before the Supreme Being The application

of Jaspers’s four categories of guilt would produce a small number ofcriminally guilty; but the vast majority of the population would be calledupon to engage in moral cleansing and spiritual renewal

Jaspers’s Die Schuldfrage was the most important postwar intellectual

response to Nazism and the Holocaust Because it readily admitted thecriminal activity of the fascist regime, yet exonerated most of the Germanpeople from direct punishment, and because it relied on a moralisticrhetoric that involved humility, contrition and atonement, it functionedwell throughout the postwar epoch as a framework for German atti-tudes towards the past Jaspers’s text set the tone for the official politicalculture of the Federal Republic, establishing a moral consensus for con-fronting Germany’s troubled legacy From discussions of reparations and

Postwar literature and philosophy commemorations of the ‘night of broken glass’ (‘Kristallnacht’) to rela-tions with Israel and Willi Brandt’s kneeling gesture at the Warsaw ghetto,West Germany adhered to a high ethical path that resonates in Jaspers’sdiscussions Jaspers himself, however, was hardly satisfied with the impact

of his essay in the immediate postwar era or in the ensuing two decades

It is a curious and sobering fact of intellectual life in West Germany thatJaspers’s work stands virtually alone; outside of a few official proclama-tions from the church and an occasional remark by a politician, there was

no intellectual response to the questions concerning German guilt andresponsibility, even as the extent of German atrocities became widelyknown There was no general discourse, no public sphere for the issuesJaspers raised, and even in, two years before his death, Jaspers was

to lament that the spiritual reversal he had deemed necessary if Germanywas to redress its grave transgressions had not occurred

A third philosophical figure must be conjured to account for a variety

of response that was neither sociological and political, nor religious andmoralistic Martin Heidegger, whose involvement with National Social-ism in thes was well known, represents another mode of dealing withthe past Philosophically he shared with Jaspers, at least in his early work

around Sein und Zeit (; Being and time), a concern with the existential

predicament of the individual; like Adorno and Horkheimer, he posited

an overarching critique of Western man since the Greeks But perhapsbecause of his own association with National Socialism as rector of theUniversity of Freiburg in–, he was silent about Nazism and theHolocaust after the war The scant remarks he did make were defensiveand equivocal In one instance he compared the Nazi genocide to mech-anised agriculture; in another he likened the Shoah to the expulsion ofethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and their detainment in reloca-tion camps His only public interview on the topic of his Nazi affiliationwas carefully staged and edited by Heidegger himself and was allowed

to appear only after his death.In the interview he portrays himself as avictim of National Socialism and downplays any significant involvement

or intellectual affinity with the party At best Heidegger can be accused

of a moral failing But it is less a personal fault than a structural flaw thatone encounters in Heidegger’s mendacity and prevarication Heidegger,like many of his fellow intellectuals, sought to ignore the past and es-cape into a realm of existential concerns or linguistic play In this sense

he represents an amoral strand of German literature and philosophy,one that occupies a marginal position until thes, when it emerges

in the guise of postmodernism, challenging the moral and political

 Robert C Holub

consensus set primarily by Jaspers and those who implicitly adhered

to his message of remorse and atonement

L I T E R A T U R E O F I M M E D I A T E E X P E R I E N C E

For young authors, coming to terms with the past meant trying to stand their own actions as combatants in World War Two Perhaps themost common figure in postwar literature was the soldier, either involved

under-in battle or returnunder-ing home Because these men were overwhelmed bythe war and by the utter collapse of the value system under which theyhad lived, the initial postwar efforts were largely records of experience.But unlike the militaristic and nationalistic war novels of the Third Reichthat praised warfare and the warrior, the prose of the returning soldierswas sober and subjective, looking inward In more than one sense thelabel ‘literature of the rubble’ characterises well these endeavours toconfront the horrors of the battlefield With Germany lying in ruins, anew generation of authors found that they could no longer rely on theideology with which they had gone to war, or the language formerlyused to express feelings and emotions They were compelled instead toseek from the fragments of their existence and their language a means

to construct some meaning for their behaviour and the actions of theGerman nation In the initial decade following the Second World Warmost writers were unable to comprehend the larger issues that informedtheir lives Reacting against ideology as a general evil, they took solace

in a private and moralistic view of humanity The purview of much ofthis writing is limited; the narrative voice is often a first-person account

or filtered through a single subjectivity; the descriptions are sparse, andthere is an effort to convey candour and simplicity The German sol-diers in postwar literature are contrite, but they themselves are victims

of Nazism, not perpetrators of crimes

No writer typifies this postwar mood more than Heinrich B¨oll (–

) The recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in , B¨oll was

an author whose writings charted the developments in West Germanliterature for over three decades A critic of the smugness accompanyingthe ‘economic miracle’ in the s and an ally of progressive forcesduring the turbulent s and s, he began his career with a se-

ries of moving portrayals from the lives of common soldiers Der Zug war

p¨unktlich ( ; The train was on time) is exemplary in this regard.It depictsthe train ride of a reluctant common soldier named Andreas from hisfurlough in Cologne to the eastern front in Poland On his journey he

Postwar literature and philosophy befriends two soldiers whose experiences have made them victims of thewar: Willi returned home to find his wife sleeping with another man;the blond soldier, who is never identified by name, has been raped byhis sergeant on a lonely outpost on the eastern front Andreas has notbeen violated by the war in such a direct fashion, but since the narrativeconsists largely of his thoughts and observations, we know that he sufferspangs of guilt for his involvement in brutality he can neither compre-hend nor prevent All three are weary, carrying out actions mechanicallywithout any commitment to the cause they serve Although the warseems ubiquitous, the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler are never mentioned

by name; they are not part of Andreas’s consciousness For the mostpart the Holocaust is also absent; Andreas prays for the Jews, but theyare only one group among many that weigh upon his conscience, andnone of the characters acknowledges the Nazi policy of genocide or itsimplementation

B¨oll’s novel illustrates well the moral imperatives initiated by Jaspers’sessay Jaspers’s message was one of individual, spiritual values, and byfocusing on the reflections of a young, naive and innocent figure, thenarrative structure precludes any analysis of larger issues surroundingthe war and its attendant barbarity The political or social dimensions

of the Third Reich are beyond the grasp of all agents; the charactersrelate to their situations directly and sensuously without distance orreflection The sole purpose of Andreas’s prayers is to attain personalpeace with himself, to atone for any wrong-doing in his life His previousactions, however, cannot be categorised as criminal; at most they consist

of minor moral or ‘metaphysical’ failings for which he is determined

to atone He is thus exemplary of the type of person required to fulfilJaspers’s call for a renewal in the postwar era Both Jaspers and B¨ollderive their conceptual framework and their imagery from the Christian,religious sphere B¨oll’s Andreas is transparent as a wartime Christ figure,praying for the sins of all humanity, those perpetrating crimes and thosedeceived by Nazi propaganda, as well as the war’s many victims He is

a soldier with no weapon but prayer – he has left his rifle at home – who

is delivered up to death by a Polish prostitute trying to rescue him andhis two companions from the bloodshed B¨oll’s characters in his earlyworks, like Andreas, represent the goodness remaining in Germany.Themselves defiled and violated by a war they did not countenance,they function to reassure Germans of their basic decency despite theirimplication in horrific occurrences Providing metaphysical solace

in a devastated nation, they suggest that the German past could be

 Robert C Holub

best confronted with moral reform rather than institutional or socialchange

Similar in this regard is Draußen vor der T¨ur (; The man outside),

the most important play of the immediate postwar period. Its author,Wolfgang Borchert (–), was a war veteran who, like his heroBeckmann, had served on the harsh eastern front and who returnedphysically and emotionally damaged Using techniques borrowed fromthe expressionist epoch, Borchert portrays the anguish experienced by asoldier, obviously a type of German Everyman, trying to adjust again tocivilian life The play is structured around Beckmann’s encounters withpersons in postwar society; in successive scenes he meets a girl whosehusband has not yet returned from the war, his former commanding of-ficer, a theatre producer and Frau Kramer, who informs him of his par-ents’ suicide Interspersed are surrealistic dialogues between Beckmannand ‘the Other One’ Each encounter demonstrates his difficulty in re-gaining a place in postwar Germany Indeed, the very title indicates thatestrangement defines Beckmann’s existence Even if the outer accou-trements of war are stripped away – and Beckmann’s never are – thepsychic damage remains, causing Beckmann to be perceived as a freakand to consider himself foreign To an extent this play is also based onindividual and moral premises reminiscent of Jaspers’s essay Beckmann,like Andreas, is in no sense criminally responsible for the suffering ofthe war; both are victims rather than perpetrators, Germans who wereopposed or indifferent to the political forces of Nazism, and who were in-nocent of racist prejudice Like most initial confrontations with the fascist

legacy, Draußen vor der T¨ur is less concerned about the violence inflicted

on others by Germans than about the debilitating impact of battle onthe native population As if overwhelmed by the war and the callousness

of the postwar era, Beckmann wanders zombie-like through Germansociety, unable to end his own life, but with no direction

Beckmann’s predicament obviously reflected the situation of sands of soldiers who found themselves in a state of material and spiritualdepravity His drama is existential not simply because it includes healthydoses of existential themes such as individuality, dread and anxiety, thefinitude of existence and a reliance on human subjectivity, but because

thou-it presents these themes at a time when existence thou-itself was a real tion for the German populace In contrast to B¨oll’s Andreas, for whomGod was the focal point of a more human world, Beckmann finds him-self abandoned even by the Supreme Being As striking as Nietzsche’sreflections on the death of God is the opening prologue, in which an

ques-Postwar literature and philosophy undertaker, who metamorphoses into Death, confronts an old man whoreveals himself as God Death wins the dialogical battle when God con-fesses that he is powerless to alleviate the suffering of the world, and

at the close of the play Beckmann cries out in vain for succour from asilent and impotent deity Inside this existentially tinged frame, however,Borchert includes a good deal more social critique than one finds in theearly B¨oll The colonel who gave Beckmann responsibility for elevenmen who eventually perished suffers no pangs of remorse; he is enjoying

a meal with his family and cannot identify with Beckmann’s inability

to adjust to peacetime And the producer rejects Beckmann’s strangeand frightening performance, advising him to practise further, and thattruth has nothing to do with real art Like B¨oll’s novel, Borchert’s playrarely mentions Nazism and only alludes obliquely to the Holocaust.But it raises philosophical, social and aesthetic issues in a troublingfashion, presenting problems for which postwar experience had nosolutions

Although postwar literature and philosophy focused on the moral, cial and psychological problems confronting Germans, another type ofexperience was responsible for perhaps the most famous poem composed

so-in German so-in the entire century, ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death fugue’) Written

by the Romanian and later French citizen Paul Celan (–) ably at the close of the war, it appeared first in , but it becameknown only in  when it was included in the collection Mohn und

prob-Ged¨achtnis (Poppy and remembrance) A haunting lyrical cadence that

em-ploys chant-like repetition and striking imagery, ‘Todesfuge’ adapts thetechniques of a Baroque fugue, weaving motifs together and alteringthem slightly when they reappear It opens with the paradoxical im-age of ‘black milk’, evoking a sinister nurturing as well as the billows ofsmoke ascending towards the heavens from the crematorium The Jewishprisoners imbibe this milk all day; it is simultaneously sustenance andbane:

Schwarze Milch der Fr ¨uhe wir trinken sie abends

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts

wir trinken und trinken

wir schaufeln ein Grab in den L ¨uften da liegt man nicht engBlack milk of morning we drink it at evening

we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we shovel a grave in the skies there is room enough there

 Robert C Holub

A contrast to the miserable existence of the Jews, who are never named

as Jews and who are always presented in the plural, is provided by aGerman SS guard; the German lives in a house, plays with serpentsand writes letters home to Germany His interaction with the Jews isviolent and humiliating: he forces them to whistle and dance for hisamusement; he threatens them with dogs; he shoots them with bullets.Interwoven in these lines are references to a typically German woman,Margarethe, whose blond hair is implicitly contrasted with the ashen hair

of Shulamite from the Song of Solomon The eeriness and stark imagery

in this poem resemble techniques in Borchert’s surrealist drama, but herethe experience is not of a German soldier but of the Jewish victims ofNazi genocide

Celan’s poem became important because it was an unusually evocativeeffort to depict the Holocaust, an event at once so incomprehensible and

of such enormous proportions that it appears to thwart representation.Indeed, Adorno was thinking specifically of this poem when he declaredthat writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric Obviously Adornocould not have been accusing poets like Celan or Nelly Sachs (–

), whose postwar lyrics also dealt with the Holocaust, of the barism their poetry was attempting to expose Adorno’s concern camefirst from the dangers of an aestheticisation of something beyond the pale

bar-of humanity If an author composes a poem about any subject, he mustemploy an aesthetic form or veneer that threatens to direct us awayfrom the experience, the history, the reality The rhythms and figuresthat Celan has woven into his ‘Todesfuge’ may deflect from the verytheme of the poem, distancing us, or bemusing us, enchanting us, ratherthan drawing us into reflection and critique They may also suggest, asAdorno wrote in another context, that something about the event makessense, so that the horror is removed and the victims are done an injustice

by art. But Adorno is also concerned about the social order in whichsuch a poem could be written; the essay in which his provocative re-mark appeared bears the title ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ (‘Culturalcriticism and society’), and his characterisation of the postwar world

as a place of absolute reification suggests that there is no location orstandpoint from which criticism or culture could cope with the exi-gencies of post-Holocaust modernity. Although Adorno was later tomodify his dictum on poetry after Auschwitz, the predicament of how

to represent the Holocaust – and what such representation meant forcultural criticism – would figure prominently in the activist literature ofthes

Postwar literature and philosophy 

B R E A K T H R O U G H A N D R E-O R I E N T A T I O N

The literature of immediate experience ceded in thes to a cency with regard to the German past Theoretical and literary reflectioninclined towards an existential mood, which did not exclude considera-tion of the war, but did not further a working through of the trauma ofNazism and the Holocaust In the German-speaking world Swiss writerswere more widely recognised and innovative than their German coun-terparts The novels of Max Frisch (–), Stiller (; I’m not Stiller) and Homo faber (), with their focus on outsiders, are not without social

compla-commentary, but their main concerns are questions of identity and self.The plays of Friedrich D ¨urrenmatt (–), in particular Besuch der alten

Dame ( ; The visit), employ techniques of the grotesque and the absurd

to uncover the hypocrisy of the postwar recovery From Germany thewritings of Wolfgang Koeppen (–) expressed deep regret aboutthe direction taken in the Adenauer restoration, but in general literaryworks left the larger questions of guilt and responsibility unexplored.Amid the remarkable economic recovery known as the ‘economic mira-cle’ German intellectuals appeared content to quibble with some socialdevelopments and to wonder about issues of being and essence, butthey remained largely insensitive, publicly, to the wrongs committed bytheir nation during the Third Reich Recognising the tendency in theFederal Republic to deny or minimise past wrongs, Adorno ascribes it to

a psychic mechanism of repression Similarly Alexander and Margarethe

Mitscherlich analysed Die Unf¨ahigkeit zu trauern (; The inability to mourn)

as a collective German neurosis Neither Adorno nor the Mitscherlichs,however, recommend traditional Enlightenment to alleviate anti-Semiticsentiments in postwar Germany Rather, they advocate a programmethat will strengthen subjectivity so that individuals can resist fascistideology

The turning point for German prose literature on the issue of coming

to terms with the past occurred with the publication of G ¨unter Grass’s

Die Blechtrommel ( ; The tin drum), a novel that also put Germany on

the map again in world literary circles Grass belongs to the generation

of writers and intellectuals that have contributed most to the moral sensus that developed around Nazism and the Holocaust Born in,Grass and all his generation spent their formative years under NationalSocialism and fought in the war, but because of their youth were rarely

con-in positions of responsibility When they emerged as young men andwomen, the more reflective among them endeavoured to account andatone for the crimes committed by Hitler’s Germany After the war Grass

of the focal points of the German literary scene ever since Katz und Maus

(; Cat and mouse) and Hundejahre (; Dog years) followed quickly after

Die Blechtrommel, and the three works, which are set in Grass’s birthplace,

became known as the Danzig trilogy Since thes Grass has also been

an important figure in German politics As an outspoken member of theSocial Democratic Party, he has lent his support to political candidatesand causes on many occasions Most controversial was his position onGerman unification, which he initially opposed, in part because of thelegacy of Auschwitz His most important novels, though complex and

multi-dimensional, reflect his political commitment: Der Butt (; The

flounder) traces women’s contribution to culture from prehistory to the

present, while his most recent work, Ein weites Feld ( ; Too far afield ),

casts a critical eye on German history of the twentieth century, cially in light of recent developments In  the Swedish Academyrecognised him with the Nobel Prize for literature

espe-In Die Blechtrommel Grass employed a unique narrative means to view

the past. His narrator and hero, Oskar Matzerath, who was born inDanzig in and has refused to grow since the age of three, relates ret-rospectively his exploits from a mental institution in the Federal Republic

on his thirtieth birthday His standpoint is thus at once that of a childand that of someone able to see under and through the machinations ofthe adults around him Growing up in Danzig in the late twenties andearly thirties in a mixed Polish-German family, Oskar offers the reader agrotesque perspective on the petit-bourgeois milieu before the war andduring the Nazi occupation of Poland He himself is at first not enthralled

by the Nazis: at a mass demonstration he transforms their marches intowaltzes and thus thwarts their nationalist and militarist celebration But

he later joins a travelling theatre group, composed of midgets like self, that entertains at the front, contributing there to raising the morale

him-of the troops Significant is not so much Oskar’s allegiances and scious desires, or the exact nature of his adventures, which leave manydead people in his wake Rather, important for the course of postwarGerman literature is the linguistic virtuosity with which Grass weavestogether various motifs, while criticising implicitly the mentalities that

con-allowed the rise of fascism Die Blechtrommel is an antithetical Bildungsroman;

Oscar does not grow and mature into a paragon of humanism, but, like

Postwar literature and philosophy the German people, remains immature and unable to view the pastexcept as a deformed and deranged dwarf Perhaps not coincidentallySiegfried Lenz (–) utilised a similar formula almost a decade later

for his extremely successful Deutschstunde ( ; The German lesson).In amore directly critical view of the ideals that led to National Socialism,Siggi Jepsen, imprisoned in a reformatory, relates how his father’s zeal incarrying out his duty as a policeman destroyed a family and a friendship

In both Grass’s and Lenz’s novels the reader is forced to view NationalSocialism and its aftermath from within the mind of a limited narrator.But in both cases this puerile perspective reveals the absurdity of theNazi mentality Important is not immediate experience, but the filterednarrative viewpoint of someone unable to fathom the very events that

he is relating

Grass perfected this technique in the second part of his trilogy, Katz

und Maus, which remains a pivotal text for understanding the way in

which Germany confronted its troubled past.The novella is apparentlyabout a teenager, Joachim Mahlke, and his youthful exploits in Danzigduring the war Son of a deceased Polish railway worker, Mahlke is atfirst an awkward and unathletic boy, who then develops great physicalprowess and some unusual quirks of character With a group of peers heswims regularly to a half-sunken Polish mine-sweeper, and Mahlke soonbecomes the fastest swimmer and the most proficient diver; he is even able

to make his way into a secret hideaway, the radio room of the boat thatcan be accessed only by a long and complicated dive He drags almostall of his belongings into the hideaway and sets up there a veritablechapel to his religious obsession, the Virgin Mary He also becomesobsessed with the knight’s cross, a military honour for special valourand achievement, and he even pilfers the medal from a distinguishedvisitor to his high school, which results in his expulsion Although still ateenager, Mahlke changes his mind suddenly about military service andenlists; he soon distinguishes himself in battle, blowing up enough tanks

to win a knight’s cross himself When his former principal, the ardentdisciplinarian Klohse, refuses to allow him to address the school because

of his former transgression, Mahlke stalks and then strikes him Mahlkefails to return to his regiment, seeking shelter instead in his sanctuary onthe mine-sweeper But he never resurfaces

Like the writings of immediate experience, this novella is about a tim of the war years Although Mahlke becomes an exemplary soldier,

vic-he is tvic-he prototypical outsider, unable to adapt to tvic-he exigencies of a imented order His relationship to National Socialist organisations and

reg- Robert C Holub

to the official ideology thus remains ambivalent He is dismissed from

a Nazi youth group because he refuses to become a squad leader: hisattendance at church would have conflicted with his leadership duties

He thinks his schoolmates are crazy for wanting to enter the military, andhis own accomplishments as gymnast, swimmer and soldier appear to

be personally rather than ideologically motivated Grass had the chancehere to present the education of a National Socialist, but he chose not to.Instead, he presents us with a misunderstood teenager trying to cope withthe difficulties of growing up under conditions that he himself considersnormal Mahlke and his friends do not question National Socialism orits ideology; it is the only governmental system that they have ever reallyknown Indeed, the frightening aspect of the novella is how easily theyouth of Danzig has internalised militaristic vocabulary and aspirations.They fit in with the system, however, not because they are convincedNazis like their principal Klohse, but because they are unable to thinkoutside of the parameters set for them Only Mahlke remains an indi-vidual whose actions arbitrarily coincide with or contest the prevailingorder

The novella is about more than Mahlke It is also, and perhaps evenprimarily, about the narrator, a man the reader eventually learns is namedPilenz and who was Mahlke’s boyhood friend Pilenz is connected withthe church; two-thirds through the novella the reader learns that he hasbeen encouraged to write his account by Father Alban, who advises him

‘to get it off his chest’ Pilenz also mentions casually that he admires

St Augustine’s Confessions, and that the story he tells is about, among

other things, ‘mea culpa’ The attentive reader soon realises that Pilenz

is writing a confession, and that his descriptions of Mahlke’s actions,which he stylises into a veritable saint’s life, are part of a personal atone-ment Indeed, the very title of the novella and the opening episode suggestthat the story is structured according to a framework of guilt and vic-timisation In the opening chapter and several times thereafter Pilenzrelates an incident on a playing field; Mahlke was lying in the sun andhis enormous Adam’s apple, perpetually in motion, attracts the attention

of a cat, which, the reader comes to recognise, Pilenz places on Mahlke’sunsuspecting throat Pilenz, in short, is not only a narrator who idealisesMahlke and his exploits, but also Mahlke’s tormentor; his friend, but si-multaneously his persecutor The reader is thus repeatedly invited to seethrough Pilenz’s narrative and to discover the adolescent ambivalencetowards someone who is different Eventually we catch Pilenz lying toMahlke, or perhaps to the reader; in particular Pilenz’s description of his

Postwar literature and philosophy actions when Mahlke goes into hiding raises questions about his honestyand the nature of his relationship to his alleged friend.

Like the works of thes and the theme of Jaspers’s seminal work,

Katz und Maus is about guilt But unlike these earlier works that helped

create an individualistic moral consensus, Grass makes the assignment

of guilt and responsibility more difficult Perhaps the main way in which

he unsettles the question of morality is by unsettling the narrative: if

we remain uncertain whether what we are reading is a true account,

we may be unable to delineate with clarity motives and accountability.While on one level the novella is about the relentless effort to reduce life

to conformity, in particular to a conformity that maintains a veneer ofGermanness and German values, it is also about how postwar Germans,left with guilt for actions they cannot directly admit and perhaps donot even understand, fail to come to terms with their past Pilenz isexemplary in his prevarication and his obfuscation of his true relationshipwith Mahlke, whom he assists but also betrays Significant is an incidentrelated in the novella about a teacher named Brunies, who obviouslyheld liberal views opposed to Nazism Eventually he is arrested andimprisoned on what appears to be a trumped up charge of eating vitamintablets designated for students Actually he was denounced, and Pilenz’sremark – ‘I hope I didn’t testify against him’ – captures well the mentalstate of a nation fifteen years after the war unable to attain any certaintyabout its past, hoping that it is not guilty of actions for which it must be

ashamed Katz und Maus is not a work about immediate reactions, about

recent experiences; it is about contemplation and the inability to reflectupon the past as a mature and autonomous subject Pilenz tries to writehimself free, but he remains a childlike narrator, unable to comprehend

or to admit the implications of his own actions

P O L I T I C I S I N G T H E P A S T

Thes were a time of questioning in many Western nations Thegeneration growing up in thes, discontented with the complacency

of its parents, rebelled against the values and norms of bourgeois society

In Germany there were special dimensions of this rebellion Thesrepresented not only a growing prosperity and the reintegration into theWestern family of nations, but also repression of the past Other Westernnations emerged from the war without any collective trauma; the youth

of the student movements therefore rebelled against a vaguely definedestablishment, but rarely against anything connected with the Second

 Robert C Holub

World War German activists of the sixties, however, were concerned notonly about the reinstallation of traditional values by their elders, but alsoabout the avoidance of a thoroughgoing and candid confrontation withNazism and the Holocaust The generational conflict in West Germanyhad special meaning; sons and daughters called into question not merelythe life-style of their parents, but also their involvement in the ThirdReich The outstanding literature of thes thus tends to be less thegrotesque and playful writings of Grass or the satire of petty bourgeoislife associated with a novel like Martin Walser’s (–) Halbzeit (;

Half-time), than works of direct confrontation and overt engagement We

are no longer concerned with coming to terms with one’s own experienceand involvement or overcoming personal psychic malfunction, but withaccusing others of complicity and responsibility for some of the mosthorrendous acts of world history For the first time German literaturetakes note of the Holocaust in works that are not personal, but attempt

to be objective; that literature became increasingly involved during thesixties with documentation, especially of the Holocaust but also of otherworld occurrences, and contrasts sharply with the writings of the firsttwo postwar decades

The most important play of the German postwar period – althoughnot necessarily the most aesthetically accomplished – was undoubtedly

Der Stellvertreter ( ; The deputy) by Rolf Hochhuth (–).The stageproduction in Berlin created a sensation not only in Germany but aroundthe globe, because its theme was the role of the Vatican in the Holocaust,and because it contained an implicit accusation that Pope Pius XII couldhave and should have done more to prevent the loss of Jewish lives.The main plot is rather convoluted and at times slightly melodramatic.Riccardo Fontane, a young Jesuit priest and son of an influential pa-pal adviser, meets by chance the SS Officer Kurt Gerstein, who tries invain to convince the Vatican’s German representative to ask the Pope tointercede on behalf of the Jews Gerstein, whose duties as an engineerafford him access to the extermination camps, plays the role of a doubleagent, working apparently for the Nazis in sensitive positions, yet se-cretly conspiring with anyone who will help him retard the machinery ofdeath Eventually Riccardo has a session with the Pope, but it is evidentthat Pius XII cares more about world politics, Vatican investments andHitler’s opposition to communism than he does about the destruction ofEuropean Jewry Riccardo decides to take on the responsibility that thePope will not assume: he travels to Auschwitz to be among the victims.Riccardo dies at the hands of ‘the doctor’, an obvious fictionalisation of

Postwar literature and philosophy Josef Mengele, and when Gerstein’s machinations are exposed, he andthe Jewish person he endeavoured to rescue are also murdered.

The bold act of putting the Pope on trial before the eyes of the worldmade this play notorious, but it also signalled an important shift in theway writers dealt with the troubled German past Hochhuth made ex-tensive use of documentation and research to compose his drama; theplot is original, but most of the characters are either historical or based

on historical persons The book version includes elaborate stage tions containing information on the figures in the play, the Holocaustand other issues the author wishes to promulgate in print; in a lengthyappendix Hochhuth discusses his sources in detail These cited materialsgive an insight into Hochhuth’s practice as a playwright and set a tonefor both documentary literature of thes and the desire to remainobjective about the past It is obvious that Hochhuth had studied thememoirs, biographies, diaries, letters, speeches and legal protocols thatpertain to the Jewish question under the Third Reich before framinghis play What he has written is therefore thoroughly documented in thesense that every major scene and action, every reference and allusionhas some basis in historical reality Rather than publish a history of theJewish question with regard to the Catholic Church or an examination ofPius XII’s positions on the extermination of the Jews during the SecondWorld War, Hochhuth fashions his ‘facts’ into dramatic form, insistingthat he used invention only in order to transform the raw material into

direc-a form suitdirec-able for the stdirec-age We might conceive of Hochhuth’s method,therefore, as different from, but somewhat analogous to previous writers.Instead of experience – the primary source for Grass, B¨oll, and Borchert –Hochhuth employs history, but he, like they, adds something to it to make

it a literary work What comes to dominate Hochhuth’s drama are factsand arguments such as one might encounter in a historical study, notnecessarily a piece of art His way of confronting the past thus becomesqualitatively different from previous attempts because he is interested intwo things that had been previously separated: a public and accessiblestatement such as one finds in literature, film and drama, and a histori-cal argument based on documents, such as one might find in a piece ofscholarly writing

Two aesthetic problems inhere in Der Stellvertreter The first relates to

the representation of the Holocaust In the final act Hochhuth situatesthe action in Auschwitz, and he is well aware of the artistic minefield he istrying to traverse Documentary realism, the representational approach

he had used throughout, is inadequate to depict an event that exceeds

 Robert C Holub

human imagination, but he also contends that Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ is anequally unsuccessful representation because it resorts to metaphors andthus mitigates the horror Although he is able to recognise the dilemmafacing an author wishing to represent the Holocaust, he is unable toarrive at a solution The stylised poetic first scene of Jews in boxcars andthe naturalist dialogue for the remainder of the act simply replicate thetwo alternatives Hochhuth found unsatisfactory Indeed, this inability toreach an aesthetically adequate form is at the heart of the second prob-lem Hochhuth’s drama is structured around a series of dialogues; inmost cases a representative of the forces attempting to obtain a strongerintercession from the Pope debates with someone articulating the papalposition; in other scenes Gerstein spars with the incarnation of evil, thedoctor The action moves towards a climax; good and evil are clearly de-lineated; personal decisions, informed by autonomous individuals andtheir chosen moral values, are presented as the forces that can thwart orsustain the Nazi genocide In short, Hochhuth’s approach to the Jewishquestion and the involvement of the Vatican in Nazi genocide is tradi-tional, reminiscent of a classical drama Hochhuth retains and developsthe moral imperative implicit in Jaspers, but removes it from personalexperience, placing it on a world-historical stage Friedrich Schiller’s

historical tragedies appear to be Hochhuth’s model: Der Stellvertreter is

ul-timately a drama of ideas, a modern morality play, and many questionedwhether the form and the structure were adequate in postwar Germany

of thes to deal with the complexities of historical events

The intellectual climate of thes, although buoyed by Hochhuth’sdrama, favoured slightly different, more ideological and more systemicexplanations for the atrocities committed in the past Exemplary in its in-

novative form and its implicit political argumentation was Die Ermittlung

(; The investigation) by Peter Weiss (–).Its subject was the trial

of twenty-two Germans active in the concentration camp at Birkenau Beginning on December , the trial lasted over a yearand a half The most important proceedings involving German warcrimes to take place in Germany since the initial Nuremberg Trials in

Auschwitz-, and rivalled in notoriety only by the Eichmann proceedings inIsrael in, the Auschwitz trial was the first major action taken byGermans against former concentration camp guards and the first result

of inquiries by the Central Office for Investigation of National SocialistCrimes, established in Ludwigsburg in  The sensation caused bythe lurid testimony and the reactions of the defendants created a lastingimpression on the German political and intellectual scene: the trial was

Postwar literature and philosophy responsible, in part, for ensuring that the statute of limitations on Nazicrimes would not expire Perhaps more importantly the court proceed-ings in Frankfurt contributed to a new public consciousness concerningthe Nazi past, marking a turning point in the society’s willingness toconfront the past and try to understand how Germans could have per-petrated such horrendous crimes.

In attendance at the Auschwitz trial on March  was Weiss,

whose play Marat/Sade (), then in the midst of rehearsals, was to

be-come a German and then an international success Born into a Jewishfamily that converted to Protestantism, Weiss was nonetheless forced toflee Germany in after the Nazis had come to power He became

a Swedish citizen in, and although he acquired considerable fame

in Germany, he maintained his residence in Sweden until his death in

 His initial literary endeavours were composed in Swedish, but heeventually settled on German as his language for literature His earlywork, influenced to a degree by Franz Kafka and relating primarily tohis experiences in exile, was part of the existentialist, autobiographicalmode of the postwar era By the mid-sixties, however, Weiss, like manywriters of that period, had turned to more political concerns His break-

through work, Marat/Sade, recasts the mind–body contrast in terms of social revolution and sexual pleasure After Die Ermittlung Weiss continued

with documentary works that supported his leftist political commitment:plays thematising anti-colonial struggles in Angola and Vietnam werefollowed by dramas dealing with H¨olderlin and Trotsky Weiss’s master-

piece in prose was his monumental, three-volume ¨ Asthetik des Widerstands

(–; Aesthetics of resistance), a novel about working-class resistance,participation in the Spanish civil war and the Second World War, andthe place of art in modern societies

Like Hochhuth, Weiss was confronted with an immense amount of

documentation But Die Ermittlung, in contrast to Der Stellvertreter,

inte-grates factual materials in novel and imaginative ways Hochhuth structs a story based on conventional dramatic structures: exposition,complication, climax, d´enouement and tragic end He employs his doc-uments as ammunition in the speeches of the various characters, in stagedirections, or in his lengthy prose conclusion Weiss abandons traditionaldramatic structure and constructs his drama around a creative citationand adaptation of the documents themselves He does not aim to re-construct or invent a narrative of events, but instead seeks to recount insystematic form various aspects of the concentration camp His eleven

con-‘acts’, called ‘songs’, start with testimony on the ramp and the physical